Highest 2 Lowest is Spike Lee’s adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, which was itself an adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, set in a fictional version of New York. Lee’s version is set in a more recognisable, contemporary New York, and revolves around a music executive played by Denzel Washington who is – somewhat pompously – named David King. King built a black musical empire in the 90s and 00s and now lives with his wife and son in a luxury apartment overlooking the Hudson River. He also has the opportunity to become a billionaire by selling his company, Stackin’ Records, to a corporate conglomerate that is planning to introduce more AI music into the market. However, he’s made the decision to financially sacrifice (which apparently means selling his Sag Harbor property) to buy the company back himself in order to ensure longevity and artistic integrity. In many ways, this feels like Lee’s paean to Denzel, or to his own version of black masculinity as refracted through Denzel, as we open with King in CEO mode (“In order to have followers you gotta be leadin”), King in activist mode (“They squeeze every last drop of Black artistic culture and integrity”) and King in Dad mode to his son Trey, played by Aubrey Joseph, a rising basketball player (“We gonna work on your handles, not your TikTok reels.”)

As with Kurosawa’s film, the driving narrative event is the abduction – or the apparent abduction – of King’s son Trey. Initially, the abductors report that they have taken Trey, but it soon becomes clear that they have accidentally kidnapped Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s longtime friend and advisor Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). This immediately introduces a precarity to King’s existence; or rather, draws out a precarity that is inherent to King’s existence, since Paul doesn’t have the means to pay the enormous ransom of 17.1 million dollars. To pay this, King will have to sacrifice the majority of his fortune, turning Highest 2 Lowest into a distant relative of Kanye West’s Yeezus by suggesting that black precarity exists even within the top 0.01% of black wage earners, who face a racial ceiling even at the highest echelon of wealth. However, this is not merely a financial sacrifice – paying the ransom will prevent King buying back Stackin’ Records, meaning that his life’s work will be handed over to the AI conglomerate that stands in for “the man.” Yet there’s something about the ransom situation that appeals to King’s nostalgia for hunger, for the hustle, for a time when he took risks. He comes alive immediately with the blackmail plot, and almost seems to welcome the possible hit to himself as a way of feeling vital again.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that King becomes a likeable character, however, or that he embraces the challenge of helping Paul right away. As with Kurosawa, the first half of the film takes place in Paul’s elite apartment – the “highest” part of the city – where we witness the insulation and adulation that comes with his extreme wealth. This isn’t entirely his fault, since the police tell him emphatically to remain in place and not interfere in the investigation, albeit making concessions to his status as New York royalty: “I know a man of your stature is not used to being told what to do.” Nevertheless, the longer King remains holed up in his penthouse, the more inadequate he seems to the situation, and the more apathetic and unlikeable he becomes; it takes him some time to even commit to paying the ransom, despite the fact that it was his own son who was meant to be taken instead of his best friend’s. Whether he’s reclining in bed with his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) trying to justify his actions, or self-pityingly reflecting that the public could never comprehend his struggle, or gangsta-moralising with his son (he tells him he’ll bust him if he challenges his decision), this is both Lee and Denzel at their most bloviated, boring and self-important.

It doesn’t help, either, that King’s apartment is effectively a museum of Black excellence. The walls are covered with framed album covers (Run-DMC, Nas), photographs of famous musicians (James Brown, Stevie Wonder), sporting memorabilia (a shot of the Foreman/Ali fight, a Jalen Brunson jersey), historical New York memorabilia (a Brooklyn/Yankees scoreboard), political campaign material (a photo of Kamala sits prominently behind King’s hard-ass conversation with his son, as if to offset its baroque machismo) and, at the heart of it all, a series of magazine covers and news articles featuring King himself, the “Black Panther of Da Bronx.” This interior design works in two discrete ways. First, it operates as a wall, a justification of King’s decision to keep the city at bay, an argument that decades of Black oppression make his insular ultra-wealth a moral virtue in and of itself. With these images forming a buttress against the world outside, King speaks to them quite comfortably as peers: “What would you do James? What would you do Stevie? Jimi, Aretha, what would you do?” However, this interior design also works in a second way – as a threshold, rather than a wall; as an invitation to the city outside, artefacts of a more essential and athletic black life happening somewhere beyond the cloistered privilege of the Kings’ apartment.  

Interestingly, King also associates this porosity with the city with the heyday of his work as a musical producer. Pam recalls how he used to take long walks when listening to musical submissions, intermingling his impressions with the texture of the streets. In some cases, these walks took him to artists, as he immersed himself in the live performances and everyday culture of the city’s many neighborhoods. This sense of the streets emerges tentatively in the early stages of the blackmail plot, when Paul promises to check on his underground “network,” presumably unavailable even to the black police officers investigating the case, and Pam’s first question to those officers is whether they’ve issued an Ebony alert to make the most of the collective knowledge the streets have to offer. However, the move from “highest” to “lowest,” from penthouse to street, is cemented when King gets a ransom call from the street, an echo of the disembodied voices he listened to and processed during the peak of his career. He spent a lifetime listening to voices while walking the streets, and now he has to commune with a free-floating voice from the street. Lee films the abductor, who appropriately enough is played by a rapper, ASAP Rocky, from an extreme low shot in the phone booth just outside King’s skyscraper, emphasising the gulf between these two worlds, and King’s roving restlessness to return to his former gritty self.

In fact, the kidnapper wants to take King even further underground, instructing him to take a subway from Borough Hall, through Harlem, to Woodlawn, where he will make the ransom drop. This is framed, in part, as a descent narrative, but a welcome descent, and Lee devotes a significant amount of time to this train trip, which puts King back in touch with New York’s vitality, starting with the intermittent grainy footage that commences once he steps out of his limo and enters the Borough Hall station, and coincides with a big game at Yankee Stadium, which is along the route. Baseball has long been central to the phallic potency of Lee’s New York, and the train full of fans shouting “Let’s Go Yankees” is the beating heart of the film. King’s journey also coincides with Puerto Rican National Day, and it’s here that you sense Lee also yearning for the hustle and hunger of his earliest films, as Rosie Perez makes a guest appearance at the celebration, the footage growing grainer and grittier all the time. Anthony Ramos also makes a cameo, as if Lee is both tapping into and identifying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights as a descendant of the Brooklyn of Do The Right Thing. When King finally in Woodlawn, the downward trajectory continues, as he drops the ransom between carriages through a bridge, leading to a coordinated chase that culminates with him leaping down the several flights of stars that access Woodlawn station.

This descent narrative is also, in some sense, an ascent narrative, since it climaxes with the most urgent identification of a musical “voice” in King’s entire career, restoring the relationship between rapper and producer with vitality and volatility in the process. For it turns out that the abductor played by ASAP Rocky is also an aspiring rapper, Yung Felon, who named his own son after King and has spent most of his career trying to get the mega-producer’s attention. According to Yung Felon’s girlfriend, “music was the only thing giving him hope while he was locked up” in prison and in some ways the abduction is simply his latest and most desperate ploy for artistic relevance. To catch Yung Felon, King has to collaborate with his son’s generation – when Kyle is returned, he recalls hearing a rap song (“Back it up, back to the front”) playing in the next room to where he was held captive, and with Trey’s help King is able to trace it back to the up-and-coming rapper, who is very much framed as several generations beyond Lee’s Public Enemy heyday, or King’s own “Black Panther of Da Bronx.” While Kyle and Trey can point him in the right direction, it takes King’s forensic musical abilities to put the pieces together, and even when the police suggest the voice on the phone might be AI, he trusts his musical instincts and tracks Felon down.

This brings us to the third act of the film, when the two worlds, highest and lowest, finally come together. The penultimate sequence converges the physical and musical underground, as King navigates a labyrinth of cellars to arrive at Yung Felon’s studio, only to find his own professional voice revitalised in the process – or supposedly revitalised, in the form of a variant on Lee’s signature facing-the-camera signifyin’ sequence in which King and Felon trade old-school and new-school bars on either side of the studio window, intercut with a fantasia in which King inhabits and commandeers the music video that Felon wants to shoot with him. It’s all pretty cringe. Luckily, Lee moves to another poetic fusion of high and low spaces, in the form of the final chase scene, which takes place on the subway, but on elevated tracks, anchored in soaring shots of Yung Felon scrambling along the roof of the train as it travels beneath overpasses and bridges, culminating with a showdown at 161 Street-Yankee Stadium, the phallic epicentre at which King’s machismo can be restored.

It all ends happily, as the abduction and chase propels Stackin’ Records back into relevance (they soon have four of the top ten Billboard numbers, Trey joking that it’s like 2004 again) while Yung Felon’s imprisonment turns him into the biggest streaming artist globally, with every major label chasing him, in an echo of the surprise ending of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. But I found it hard to connect with these final moments, since Lee’s endless moralistic bluster really counteracts the suspense, and with the suspense, the stakes. Every time Highest 2 Lowest is about to really get going, it gets bogged down in bombast and speechifying, until it feels like Lee is deliberately setting out to emphasise Denzel’s most sententious expressions – so different, for example, to his clipped, charismatic synergy with Tony Scott. It’s all so broad and so basic, all a way of trying to distract us from the fact that Lee’s hip hop lexicon – using “Da Players” for the cast – is thirty years out of date; it really is that simple, beyond a certain point, as desperate as the film is to prove that its relevant.

There’s also something pointed about the fact that the film ends with King signing a young female soul singer at his son’s behest. In More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun defined the Afrofuturist impulse in part as a resistance to the unmediated “authentic” soul voice in favour of more fragmented and alien ways of envisaging a black futurity that cannot exist within realism as we know it. Here, Lee opts for the former, since there is no need for an alternative future given how King thrives within the system; he is so insulated by wealth, power and prestige that the future is entirely naturalised and there is no need for any major change to America as we know it, which is perhaps why the film, for all its bluster and bombast, feels so non-eventful, so devoid of action, so lacking in stakes. The most utopian future that Highest 2 Lowest can imagine is a millionaire circling the wagons around a nepo business family while occasionally nodding at pictures of Aretha, Nas or Kamala on his walls in a desperate attempt to pretend that his world, like the film, is something other than the blandest capitalist realism. For that reason, I liked the first half of Highest 2 Lowest best, since it was the frankest about King’s wealth and insulation, but even that is ultimately disappointing, especially when compared with High and Low, one of the deftest, wittiest and most entertaining of Kurosawa’s films.